US moral theologians call on courts to set "clear limits" on the military use of AI

On October 22, 2026, at 09:49

A group of Catholic moral theologians is asking a U.S. federal court to decide in favor of "caution" and "responsibility" regarding the military use of artificial intelligence (AI) in a dispute between the American government and one of the country's leading AI companies.

The scholars, among them Jana Bennett of the University of Dayton; Fr. Michael Baggot, professor of bioethics at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum; and Joe Vukov, professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, have asked the appeals court for the Washington, D.C., region to adopt "defined normative limits" on the use of AI in war.

Legal brief from Catholic moral theologians

The dispute originates from the U.S. Department of War's use of AI models from Anthropic, an AI developer based in California. The company provided intelligence technology to the government but had prohibited its use both in warfare and in the surveillance of American citizens.

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The Department of War terminated the contract with Anthropic and subsequently designated the company a national security risk. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld that decision in a ruling last month.

In their petition supporting Anthropic's request for a hearing before the appeals court, the theologians said they were supporting the "ethical and principled position on the use of AI" by the military.

The experts said they agree that AI "should not be used for mass domestic surveillance," citing the Church's teaching on privacy in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "No one is obliged to reveal the truth to someone who has no right to know it."

Privacy "is not an absolute right," they said, but mass surveillance "clearly exceeds" the principle of privacy and would be a "clear violation" of human dignity.

Meanwhile, autonomous weapons "obscure human agency" and shift responsibility "from those who make decisions to machines."

"They accelerate military decision-making processes, which are already rapid, perhaps to the point of eliminating even the possibility of human intervention," the experts said. "Good sense and careful decision-making" must "guide all human decisions," especially those involving life and death, the theologians argue.

They cited Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Spe Salvi, according to which technological development offers "new possibilities for good" and "terrible possibilities for evil."

Within the limits it set, Anthropic "was acting as a responsible and moral corporate citizen, and not as a security threat," the experts said.